In a large cabin on a small lake in nowheresville Alabama, our leadership team took a retreat two years ago. We traveled together, cooked and shared our own meals, played a lot of the whodunit game “Werewolf” (now a retreat tradition), and drank ourselves out of tequila. We also did a lot of foundational work that makes us who we are today. Together, we came up with the Family Values we now use every day at M.L.Rose, Von Elrod’s, and The Sutler. Our Family’s number one value is “We Treat Everyone Like a Good Neighbor”. To us, that means our business is much more than transactional. Neighbors are people whom we expect to see again and again, so we own our interactions with them. We get to kno

What a month it’s been. Garrison Keillor said “March is the month God created to show people who don’t drink what a hangover is like.” We sure are feeling that now. On March 3, our sister restaurant Von Elrod’s was just on the edge of the path of the powerful tornado that ripped through Germantown. Thankfully the damage was contained, but this was also our first grim taste of what it feels like to tell many people on our team they can’t come to work for a while. No sooner did we get through the turmoil of cleaning up and reopening Von Elrod’s, did we start feeling the realities of COVID-19. Our mission quickly became distilled to these three critical items: 1) Keep as many people safely work